WHY WON'T THEY LISTEN? - Professor Helen King (Safeguarding LGBT+ People in the Church, Day 1)

Описание: Safeguarding LGBT+ People in the Church
📅 Monday 6 – Tuesday 7 October 2025
📍 Exeter College, Oxford (Cohen Quad, Walton St.) + Online
Professor Helen King
WHY WON'T THEY LISTEN?

In this session I would like to go back to asking what is the
basic question that lies behind the failure to value and
safeguard those whose gender identity is not cis, and whose
sexuality is not straight. In the Living in Love and Faith
discussions, it was originally suggested that the underlying
issue was about how we read the Bible. The book published
as the result of Living in Love and Faith offered seven
different ways of doing this, all of them presented as valid,
but that section is rarely quoted and instead we encounter the
binary of ‘literal/non-literal’ readings. That is too often
presented as ‘right way/wrong way’; even though the most
literal reader would still agree that some passages are not to
be taken literally! Song of Songs is one example of where the
conservative reader would insist on a non-literal meaning,
making it into an allegory of Christ and the church, while a
less conservative reader may want to claim it as a story of
sexual pleasure – and violence.

I want to suggest that the real issues are twofold; although it
is often presented as such, disagreement is not really about
the Bible, but concerns firstly an unwillingness to accept the
rich spectrum of sexualities and identities shown in history
and, secondly, a deep unease with the body, combined with a
failure to understand that love is spiritual, emotional and
also physical.